Bob Woodward's Column Blaming Obama For Changing The Sequester Is Nonsense On Stilts

In a few days, some $85 billion in annual, across-the-board
spending cuts are about to hit every department in every agency
of the U.S. government.

There's no plan to avert the cuts, even though it's widely agreed
that they're bad for the economy, and could hobble the defense
department, along with many government services that many people
rely on.

Citing his reporting from when he wrote his book, Obama came up
with the idea of sequester that was 100 percent cuts.
Protestations to the contrary are totally bunk.

Woodward concludes:

In fact, the final deal reached between Vice President Biden and
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) in 2011 included
an agreement that there would be no tax increases in the
sequester in exchange for what the president was insisting on: an
agreement that the nation’s debt ceiling would be increased for
18 months, so Obama would not have to go through another such
negotiation in 2012, when he was running for reelection.

So when the president asks that a substitute for the sequester
include not just spending cuts but also new revenue, he is moving
the goal posts. His call for a balanced approach is reasonable,
and he makes a strong case that those in the top income brackets
could and should pay more. But that was not the deal he made.

The argument is silly.

You can't start a discussion about the sequester without starting
with the broader context. The sequester was offered during the
GOP's unprecedented threat to not raise the debt ceiling,
potentially putting the U.S. into default.

If offering spending cuts two years down the road is the only way
to avoid such a calamity then a U.S. President should offer that
100 times out of 100. But is it really Obama's "fault"? The
sequester wouldn't even be a term anyone knows if it weren't for
the debt ceiling nonsense.

But it gets worse. It was clearly agreed that the sequester
wouldn't be the end deal. Right after the debt ceiling fight
ended, there was the establishment of a super-committee that
would seek to find an equivalent level of deficit reduction
without the haphazard, illogical across the board cuts proposed
in the sequester. The super-committee failed to come up with
anything, but there was an established attempt to avert the end
deal.

And the argument gets even worse yet, because in politics and in
the real world, attempting to renegotiate deals is what you do
when there are preferable alternatives. There's nothing wrong
with Obama (or the GOP) offering sequester alternatives, since
people don't think the sequester is a good thing.

The GOP would like the cuts to fall mostly on non-defense
discretionary spending. Obama would like deficit reduction to
involve more revenue (closing tax loopholes and so forth). That's
not trickery. That's what you do when you think there are better
alternatives.

The sequester was a great idea compared to a 2011 default. The
White House should be proud of defusing that bomb. But now there
are better alternatives to the sequester, and they should be
pursued.